The first of the “top five” problems I see in all the texts I edit is unclear pronoun reference. Scholars certainly avoid basic “me and him went to the store” errors. But even a scholarly writer can lose track of antecedents, with confusing results.

The noun that immediately precedes a pronoun is generally the antecedent (what the pronoun is meant to represent). When other nouns appear between the pronoun and the antecedent, the writer can accidentally sound silly:

• In 1986 Jones wrote an extensive essay on Darwin and his father, but he left it on the boat.
  

Strictly speaking, he refers back to Darwin’s father, who certainly is not the person who lost the essay. Readers may understand the author’s intended meaning, but that accidental meaning lingers behind, serving as a distraction or weakening the reader’s trust in the author’s abilities.

Another kind of pronoun problem I often see in scholarly texts is the use of a possessive rather than a noun for an antecedent. A pronoun needs a noun, not a word or phrase that describes the noun, as its antecedent:

• In Darwin’s treatise, he presented ideas that challenged traditional religion.
  

Darwin’s acts as an adjective here. The only noun before he is treatise. This kind of sentence is easy to recast:

• In his treatise, Darwin presented ideas that challenged traditional religion.
  

Sometimes a pronoun could refer to two different nouns equally well:

• The rest of this poem is an extended metaphor for the life cycle. It begins with sprouting, then blooming, and eventually releasing seeds.
  

Here, the noun immediately before it is life cycle, but the reader may wonder if the author really intended it to refer to extended metaphor. The phrase “sprouting, then blooming, and eventually releasing seeds” could logically describe either life cycle or the particular metaphor under discussion. The content gives no hints to the reader about the author’s intentions. (Compare this sentence with the first example, in which the phrase in 1986 makes Darwin’s father an unacceptable antecedent for “he.”) Especially if this discussion of the metaphor is meant to introduce a long or complicated analysis, even one pronoun problem can seriously undercut what the writer is trying to say for paragraphs to come.

Pronoun reference is especially problematic when a pronoun like it is used syntactically in two different ways:

• Mrs. Smith has refused to return my phone calls, despite the intervention of one of her colleagues. This occurred two weeks ago. Her reluctance to discuss the billing problem may represent school policy. Surely the committee will agree that only if we address it and how it affects the budget will it be possible to make it better.
  

What is the it that needs to be discussed in the final sentence? The school policy? The billing problem? Does the final it (what could be made better) refer to the same noun as the first it? In terms of syntax, these its are meant to substitute for specific nouns acting as subjects (it affects) or objects (make it better, of it). But the it in will it be possible is a different kind of syntactical structure: an expletive, or a kind of “place holder” in a clause. The true subject or object of the clause appears later in these kinds of sentences; we see this use of it in sentences like “It will take six weeks to fix this problem” (for “Fixing this problem will take six weeks”) or “Make it more obvious what your purpose is” (for “Make your purpose more obvious”). Expletives are acceptable in scholarly prose, but when it has already appeared in reference to specific nouns, an expletive can make a passage confusing. Even if the reader takes only a moment to figure out the syntax, for that moment he or she is not paying attention to the ideas of the writer. Even a momentary lapse in attention can hurt the persuasiveness of the text’s overall argument.

For this paragraph, repeating nouns rather than using pronouns makes the content more clear:

• Mrs. Smith has refused to return my phone calls, despite the intervention of one of her colleagues. This intervention occurred two weeks ago. Smith’s reluctance to discuss the billing problem may represent school policy. Surely the committee will agree that only if we address the billing error and how it affects the budget will we be able to make the official policy better.
  

Note that other pronoun problems needed to be addressed also. This happened six weeks ago could have referred to the billing problem or the intervention of the colleague. Her syntactically referred to colleague rather than Smith, so repeating Smith’s name makes sure the reader understands the author’s intended meaning.

It’s easy to lose track of pronouns when writing the kind of sophisticated analyses that appear in scholarly texts. Often scholars are so immersed in building an argument that they don’t pick up on ambiguities in the prose. Editors and proofreaders have the training—and the objectivity—to catch these kinds of errors. The resulting improvement in clarity helps readers follow the scholar’s train of thought.

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